The Luminaries

you, Dick, I have never fired a gun.’
    ‘Nothing to it,’ said Mannering. ‘Easy as breathing.’ He returned to the cabinet, selecting two smart percussion revolvers from the rack.
    Frost was watching him. ‘I should be a very poor second,’ he said presently, trying to keep his voice calm, ‘if I do not know the subject of your quarrel, and I do not have the means to end it.’
    ‘Never mind—never mind,’ said Mannering, inspecting his revolvers. ‘I was going to say I’ve got a Colt Army you could use,but now that I think of it … it takes a bloody age to load, and you don’t want to bother with shot and powder. Not in this rain. Not if you haven’t done it before. We’ll make do. We’ll make do.’
    Frost looked at Mannering’s belt.
    ‘Outrageous, isn’t it?’ said Mannering, without smiling. He thrust the revolvers into his holsters, crossed the room to the coat-rack, and detached his greatcoat from its wooden hanger. ‘Don’t worry; see, when I put my coat on, and button it up, nobody will be any the wiser. I tell you, my blood is boiling, Charlie. That rotten chink! My blood is boiling.’
    ‘I have no idea why,’ said Frost.
    ‘
He
knows why,’ said Mannering.
    ‘Stop a moment,’ said Frost. ‘Just let me—just tell me this. What is it exactly that you’re planning?’
    ‘We’re going to give a Chinaman a scare,’ said the magnate, thrusting his arms into his coat.
    ‘What kind of a scare?’ said Frost—who had registered the plural pronoun with trepidation. ‘And on what score?’
    ‘This Chinaman works the Aurora,’ said Mannering. ‘This is his work, Charlie: the smelting you’re talking about.’
    ‘But what’s your grievance with him?’
    ‘Less of a grievance; more of a grudge.’
    ‘Oh!’ said Frost suddenly. ‘You don’t suppose that
he
killed Mr. Staines?’
    Mannering made a noise of impatience that sounded almost like a groan. He removed Frost’s coat from the rack, and tossed it to him; the latter caught it, but made no move to put it on.
    ‘Let’s go,’ said Mannering. ‘Time’s wasting.’
    ‘For heaven’s sake,’ the other burst out, ‘you might do me the courtesy of a plain speech. I’ll need to have my story straight, if we’re going to go storming in to bloody Chinatown!’
    (Frost regretted this phrasing as soon as he spoke—for he did not want to storm into Chinatown under
any
conditions—with his story straight or otherwise.)
    ‘There isn’t time,’ said Mannering. ‘I’ll tell you on the way. Put your coat on.’
    ‘No,’ said Charlie Frost—finding, to his surprise, that he could muster a delicate firmness, and hold his ground. ‘You’re not in a rush; you’re only excited. Tell me now.’
    Mannering dithered, his hat in his hands. ‘This Chinese fellow worked for me,’ he said at last. ‘He dug the Aurora, before I sold it on to Staines.’
    Frost blinked. ‘The Aurora was yours?’
    ‘And when Staines bought it,’ Mannering said, nodding, ‘the chink stayed on, and kept on digging. He’s on a contract, you see. Johnny Quee is his name.’
    ‘I didn’t know the Aurora had been yours.’
    ‘Half the land between here and the Grey has belonged to me at one stage or another,’ said Mannering, throwing out his chest a little. ‘But anyway. Before Staines came along, Quee and I had a bit of a quarrel. No: not exactly a quarrel. I have my way of doing things, that’s all, and the chinks have theirs. Here’s what happened. Every week I took the total of Quee’s yield—after it had been counted, of course—and I fed it back into the claim.’
    ‘You what?’
    ‘I fed it back into the claim.’
    ‘You were salting your own land!’ said Frost, with a shocked expression.
    Charlie Frost was no great observer of human nature, and as a consequence, felt betrayed by others very frequently. The air of cryptic strategy with which he most often spoke was not manufactured , though he was entirely sensible of its effects; it came, rather, out of a fundamental blindness to all experience exterior to his own. Frost did not know how to listen to himself as if he were somebody else; he did not know how to see the world from another man’s eyes; he did not know how to contemplate another man’s nature, except to compare it, either enviously or pitiably, to his own. He was a private hedonist, perennially wrapped in the cocoon of his own senses, mindful, always, of the things he already possessed, and the things